14.3.07

The Women of Jerry, Part 4

It's time to move on to the third season of Seinfeld and check in on Jerry's girlfriends! It's an actual full season of the show, too, with 23 episodes. So let's not waste time!

Episode One (18), "The Note" (aired 18 Sept. 1991). This is the episode in which Jerry and George get notes from the dentist so they don't have to pay for massages. Jerry talks about a kidnapper and freaks his therapist out. George gets a man and thinks "it moved." No girlfriend, unfortunately.

Episode Two (19), "The Truth" (aired 25 Sept. 1991). George's girlfriend is Valerie Mahaffey, so good in Northern Exposure, who asks him to tell her the truth. When he does, she enters a sanitarium. Jerry has given her his tax receipts, which she loses. No girlfriend for Jerry, but Mahaffey's presence makes up for it.

Episode Three (20), "The Pen" (aired 2 Oct. 1991). The astronaut pen. Whenever Jerry went to Florida the show suffered a bit, and this is no different. Jerry is girlfriend-less once again.

Episode Four (21), "The Dog" (aired 9 Oct. 1991). Jerry has to watch a dog. We never see the dog, but it's awful. This is a lackluster episode except for the fact that Elaine and George have nothing to talk about, which is funny 'cause it's true. Jerry is lonely once again.

Episode Five (22), "The Library" (aired 16 Oct. 1991). Despite no girlfriend for Jerry, this episode guest-stars Philip Baker Hall as the library cop Mr. Bookman, so it's awesome. Jerry does get to reconnect with a girl he had a crush on in high school, but that doesn't count.

Episode Six (23), "The Parking Garage" (aired 30 Oct. 1991). The gang gets lost in a mall parking garage. Not much time for Jerry to have a girlfriend, is there? However, this episode features a brief cameo by Cynthia Ettinger, who later showed up on Carnivàle and Deadwood (plus she was in Silence of the Lambs, which is kind of neat). She's not Jerry's girlfriend, though.

Episode Seven (24), "The Café" (aired 6 Nov. 1991). Jerry's lack of a girlfriend is getting vexing. This is the episode in which he "helps" Babu Bhatt with his restaurant and ends up putting him out of business.

Episode Eight (25), "The Tape" (aired 13 Nov. 1991). Elaine talks dirty on Jerry's tape of his show, causing all the guys to fantasize about her. Not a girlfriend in sight, but it has that good line when Ping tells George that the Chinese baldness cure will make him "look like Stalin."

Episode Nine (26), "The Nose Job" (aired 20 Nov. 1991). Finally, a girlfriend! Jerry picks up a vacuous model in the elevator and his brain plays chess with his penis to determine if he should keep seeing her. The model? Tawny Kitaen! Tawny Kitaen, break-out star of Bachelor Party (I think there was some guy named Hanks in it, too), superstar of Whitesnake videos, and would-have-been Oscar winner except for, you know, politics. She has to get a Fame Rating of 8 out of 10 just for "Here I Come Again." I suppose if you weren't a teenager in the 1980s her Fame Rating would be smaller (despite her recent drug bust, she's still not very famous), but I was, so there! Kitaen, by the way, was 30 when the episode aired. Jerry was 37. Not a bad age gap.

Episode Ten (27), "The Stranded," (aired 27 Nov. 1991). Back to no girlfriend. This episode has George leaving Jerry and Elaine at a party so he can go home with a co-worker. Largely forgettable, except Michael Chiklis is a guest star, and he's pretty good.

Episode Eleven (28), "The Alternate Side" (aired 4 Dec. 1991). No girlfriend either - Kramer gets the line in the Woody Allen movie but screws it up; George tries parking cars and screws it up; Elaine dates a much older man who has a stroke. Jerry's car is stolen, leading to his very funny exchange with the rental car agent ("You know how to take the reservation, you just don't know how to hold the reservation").

Episode Twelve (29), "The Red Dot" (aired 11 Dec. 1991). Jerry has no girlfriend, but George diddles the cleaning lady at Elaine's office! This contains the cleaning lady's very funny reminiscence about cashmere.

Episode Thirteen (30), "The Subway" (aired 8 Jan. 1992). A poor episode, with each cast member going their separate ways on the subway. No story is really all that interesting. Jerry talks to the naked man and George gets robbed. No girlfriend, alas.

Episode Fourteen (31), "The Pez Dispenser" (aired 15 Jan. 1992). No girlfriend. A funny episode, as George pre-emptively breaks up with his pianist girlfriend so he can have the "upper hand." Jerry's Pez dispenser causes problems and helps in a drug intervention.

Episode Fifteen (32), "The Suicide" (aired 29 Jan. 1992). I'm going to call Gina a "girlfriend," because she and Jerry did sleep together, I think. In this episode, Jerry's neighbor attempts suicide and his girlfriend, Gina, comes on to Jerry. Jerry is frightened to be seen with her, even though Martin is in a coma. Gina is played by Gina Gallego, who accuses Jerry of not being a man because he's afraid of a comatose man. Gallego never did much before or after this (although she did show up in CHiPs, Knight Rider, and ER, and Julia Roberts got snippy with her in Erin Brockovich), but I'll give her a Fame Rating of 5 out of 10, because this is a pretty memorable episode. She's very good in it, and Drake's Coffee Cakes (the best mass-marketed coffee cakes in the world) play a huge role in the proceedings. She was 32 when the episode aired, and Jerry was 37. Again, not a bad age gap. (I can't find any pictures I can steal, but if you go to her IMDb page you can see her.)

Episode Sixteen (33), "The Fix-Up" (aired 5 Feb. 1992). Jerry lacks a girlfriend again, and he and Elaine fix George up with Elaine's friend. This is a pretty funny episode, as George and Jerry discuss what they want in a blind date. Maggie Wheeler, who later played Janice on Friends, is the blind date, and it's strange hearing her talk without the whiny "Janice" voice.

Episode Seventeen & Eighteen (34 & 35), "The Boyfriend" (aired 12 Feb. 1992). No girlfriend, but Jerry does "date" Keith Hernandez (so does Elaine, properly). This is a very funny episode for a number of reasons: Jerry is jealous of Elaine and Keith, but he's not sure who he's jealous of; George tries to get an extension on his unemployment, leading to him trying to convince Jerry to pretend to be latex manufacturer Art Vandelay (and leading to George lying on the floor with his pants down as Jerry stands over him saying, "And you want to be my latex salesman"); and Jerry's JFK riff explaining how Hernandez couldn't possibly have spit on Kramer and Newman. If you want to count Hernandez as a "girlfriend," I'd give him a Fame Rating of 10 out of 10, as he won the 1979 MVP Award (he tied for it, but still), won two World Series titles, and is generally regarded as one of the best fielding first basemen in history. He's six months older than Jerry, by the way.

Episode Nineteen (36), "The Limo" (aired 26 Feb. 1992). No girlfriend again, as Jerry and George get in a limosine at the airport that turns out to be something very different than they thought. Not a bad episode, and it guest-stars Peter Krause (later of Six Feet Under) as a neo-Nazi.

Episode Twenty (37), "The Good Samaritan" (aired 4 Mar. 1992). Jerry sort-of has two girlfriends in this episode, but the second doesn't really count. He spots a hit-and-run driver, who turns out to be a hot woman. He begins dating her, then finds out the car she hit belongs to a woman in the building he really wanted to date! Oh, the moral conundrum! He doesn't actually get to date the second woman, because she thinks he hit her. The hit-and-run driver is played by Melinda McGraw, who is quite attractive and very funny when she gets all evil on Jerry (he threatens to tell on her). She's been a guest star on quite a number of television shows, including The X-Files, where I assume she played Scully's sister (she and Gillian Anderson are both redheads, so it makes sense). She's never been really big, but I'll give her a Fame Rating of 5 out of 10. She was 28 to Jerry's 37 when the episode aired, so the age gap is a bit significant, but not too much. The object of Jerry's desire, meanwhile, is played by Helen Slater, who was Supergirl, after all! After that and a few other 1980s movies, her career went nowhere, and even a brief guest-starring turn on Seinfeld couldn't help! Still, I give her a Fame Rating of 6 out of 10, because of Supergirl. Slater was also 28 when the episode aired, and since I can't find a picture of Melinda McGraw, I'll throw up one of Slater!

Episode Twenty-One (38), "The Letter" (aired 25 Mar. 1992). Jerry finds out his girlfriend plagiarized a Neil Simon play in a letter she wrote to him. It's a pretty funny episode. But we're here for the girlfriend, and she's played by Catherine Keener, whose Fame Rating has to be 9 out of 10. She's been nominated for 2 Oscars, for crying out loud! Keener is an excellent actress, and you can tell even back in this episode, which was before she had done anything noteworthy. She's really the first of Jerry's girlfriends to go on to bigger and better things. Good job, Catherine Keener! Keener, incidentally, turned 33 two days before this episode aired, while Jerry was still shy of his 38th birthday.

Episode Twenty-Two (39), "The Parking Space" (aired sometime in 1992). George starts to park his car, but takes too long, and Mike Moffit, a friend of Kramer's, tries to pull into the space before him. So begins a long deadlock. No girlfriend to be seen!

Episode Twenty-Three (40), "The Keys" (aired 4 May 1992). No girlfriend for the season finale, as Kramer leaves to head to Hollywood after abusing "the covenant of the keys." This episode, which continued into next season, was only okay, because it took the gang out of their comfort zone - "New York."

Not a bad season for girlfriends. 4 girlfriends (5 if you count Slater, 6 if you count Hernandez), one a 1980s sex kitten and one a future Oscar nominee. Not bad at all, especially if you throw Supergirl into the mix! And you knew it was coming: "Here I Go Again" by Whitesnake, full of Tawny Kitaen writhing on Jaguars and David Coverdale's hair! (Plus, icky French kissing!)

That's why this is a FAME rating, Jeff, and not a HOT rating! I saw Kitaen's mug shot and was surprised, not by how ugly she was (it's a mug shot, after all), but by how completely different she looked. The years have not been kind.